This application claims priority from Korean Patent Application No. 10-2004-0013781, filed on Feb. 28, 2004, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of selecting an optimized SNP marker set having a high association with a specific disease from a plurality of SNP markers.
2. Description of the Related Art
Complex diseases are generated by a plurality of genetic factors. It is known that the generation and development of these complex diseases are affected by a plurality of genes that form a complicated network. Thus, in most cases, one gene or its associated marker does not have a great degree of association with a complex disease, unlike a Mendel's genetic disease, and thus there is a difficulty in diagnosing the complex diseases. That is, it is difficult to find a causative gene or its associated marker to use a diagnosis. If only one known marker associated with a disease is used, an incorrect result of diagnosis may be obtained.
To overcome these problems, there have been attempts to develop and analyze a multiple disease marker. A method of analyzing a haplotype in which markers among various disease markers present in one gene are randomly combined has been developed. However, since only the markers in one gene are analyzed, this method is not suitable for genetic markers dispersed over various genes and chromosomes.
Ott et al. [Genome Research 11, 2115, 2001] has developed a set-association method in which relevant statistical information such as allelic association (AA) and Hardy-Weinberg disequilibrium (LD) for multiple SNP markers associated with specific diseases are blended. In the set-association method, highly associated markers can be selected by calculating the product of the two types of statistical information related to association, allelic association and Hardy-Weinberg disequilibrium. In addition, receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve analysis has been used to evaluate an ability to discriminate case individuals from control individuals. However, these methods have not been used to select optimized SNP markers associated with complex diseases.